August 02, 2018

San Francisco's streets are so filthy that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world. The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of the city in February, finding giant mounds of trash and food on the majority of streets. At least 100 discarded needles and more than 300 piles of human feces were also found in downtown San Francisco, according to the report.

The filth in the street is raising alarms among medical experts. The biggest concern: the spread of disease.

Mind your step, should you visit the place. It's so bad that big conventions have decided to move their events to other cities, and even casual tourists are vowing not to return. Forget about flowers, these days: if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear...a hazmat suit.

In somewhat related news, Seattle's Space Needle renovation is nearly complete, and parts of it will reopen tomorrow. Among the attractions: The Loupe - the world's first and only revolving glass floor, which will allow visitors to gaze 500 feet straight down, affording unobstructed views of the homeless folks peeing in the streets. The revolving floor is part of a new bar, so you can imbibe from up high.

July 31, 2018

Several lawsuits are now pending against Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, makers of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, because the drink contains little - if any - ginger.

Canada Dry Ginger Ale is made from carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, preservatives and 'natural flavors,' i.e., a flavor compound comprised predominately of flavor extracts not derived from ginger, and a minuscule amount of a ginger flavor extract,' alleges the suit, according to Buffalo News.

It always pays to read the label before purchasing - or in these cases, after purchasing.

July 21, 2018

Ancient hunter-gatherers were making and eating bread 4,000 years before the Neolithic era and the introduction of agriculture. The discovery means that ancient hunter-gatherers were using the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals, such as wild einkorn and club-rush tubers, to make flatbread-like food products. What’s more, the new paper shows that bread had already become an established food staple prior to the Neolithic period and the Agricultural Revolution.

Tobias Richter, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the new study, said the discovery was surprising on a number of levels.

“First, that bread predates the advent of agriculture and farming—it was always thought that it was the other way round,” Richter told Gizmodo. “Second, that the bread was of high quality, since it was made using quite fine flour. We didn’t expect to find such high-quality flour this early on in human history. Third, the hunter-gatherer bread we have does not only contain flour from wild barley, wheat and oats, but also from tubers, namely tubers from water plants (sedges). The bread was therefore more of a multi-grain-tuber bread, rather than a white loaf.”

They used stones to grind the materials into flour, then baked the bread in basalt stone fireplaces. They also made toast, possibly to preserve it longer. They were pretty inventive folks, considering that they lived in the stone age, and life-span was perhaps 30 years at the time.

The Central Valley has been sinking for years, but the pace has really picked up as mega-farms pump ever more water out of the underlying aquifers.

The subsidence of the San Joaquin Valley is nothing new; it's been happening since at least the 1920s. But during the recent five-year statewide drought, it accelerated at a record pace, taking infrastructure like bridges and roads down with it.

One of the casualties is the Friant-Kern Canal, a gravity-operated concrete waterway that stretches 152 miles down the valley's eastern side, supplying thousands of farmers, small cities and towns.

Along 25 miles in Tulare County, the canal has sunk so far that its carrying capacity has been cut in half, according to the Sacramento Bee.

The canal, built during the Truman era, sank two feet in two years at Terra Bella, which means that it's no longer serving its full function as a gravity system; it's now more like a gravity-fed pond. So how far has the valley floor sunk? A 1977 USGS photo gives an idea:

July 16, 2018

If you shoot an Amur tiger, you'd better kill it. Because if you don't, it'll track you to your home, destroy all your stuff, then kill you and eat you.

At the center of the story is Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grisly end in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger, and then stole part of the tiger's kill.

The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger staked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.

"This wasn't an impulsive response," Vaillant says. "The tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of time." The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking. When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him into the bush and ate him.

They're some of the largest cats on the planet, at over 500 pounds and ten feet in length. Horizontally, they can leap over 25 feet at a time; vertically, easily 12 feet. This is an interesting read. Or as Spock might say, "fascinating".

July 10, 2018

An ancient cuneiform tablet dating back to 3,000 BC, which was discovered in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, reveals that the workers of the ancient city were paid with beer rations. Beer was then a thick, nutritious, carbohydrate-loaded brew that fueled the labor of Mesopotamian and also Egyptian workers as they did the hard work of constructing stone buildings, monuments, ziggurats and pyramids.

July 09, 2018

Two hundred twelve people have been infected with an intestinal parasite in four upper Midwest states after reportedly eating pre-packed vegetable trays under the Del Monte Fresh Produce brand, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a single-celled protozoa most commonly transmitted on produce contaminated with human fecal matter, particularly from tropical or subtropical regions where the parasite is native.

The intestinal infection has been known to cause diarrhea in the form of 'frequent, sometimes explosive, bowel movements,' plus bloating and gas.

July 05, 2018

The second half of a building housing thousands of barrels of aging liquor has collapsed at the Barton 1792 distillery in Bardstown. The building housed about 20,000 barrels of aging liquor. Sazerac officials said the barrels were a variety of distilled products of different ages. Each barrel holds 53 gallons and weighs about 550 pounds.